Slack, an Automation Tool

Slack continues to be one of the communication tools of choice for companies worldwide and their marketing teams, and for good reason. With Slack, you can communicate across teams in a variety of ways and even automate your marketing. It’s popular with a variety of companies, including LinkedIn and Salesforce. As of 2018, Slack has grown to 8 million daily active users and is used by 500,000 organizations (up from 6 million daily active users and 50,000 teams in 2017). This cloud-based tool makes collaboration simple so you can improve your workflows. As an incredibly flexible and highly customizable tool, Slack is helping businesses and their marketing teams take control of their workflows via automation. Here’s how:

Reporting

Every marketing team has key performance indicators (KPIs) to follow and meet. But ensuring those KPIs are actually being met requires generating reports and often sifting through large sets of data. With Slack, you can automate this process.

For example, you can share the latest metrics with your marketing team by creating a custom slack solution that integrates reporting to automatically generate critical reports daily, hourly or the timeframe of your preference. These custom-built integrations can help you stay abreast of changes, trends, and traffic in real-time so you can make sure your team is hitting key metrics.

It’s important to note that reporting not only makes catching issues feasible but it is a way to find marketing opportunities in real time, too. Thus, once issues are discovered, you can work together with your team to act on the information provided from these insights. For example, if you discover your conversion rate is declining due to a UX issue, you can quickly communicate with your UX team via your slack channels about any required changes they need to do in order to fix the issue.

Content Calendar Updates

Being on top of your content marketing is essential for managing an important part of your inbound marketing. However, updating your calendar based on new emails that flow in or one-off instant messaging chats you receive per occurrence can become repetitive. It can also be ineffective if you aren’t updating your calendar as the information comes in since you can easily miss important dates. But with Slack, you can automate calendar updates. For example, you can create a custom solution to automate reminders for your editorial calendar events on Google using Slack integrations.

Slack also provides a way for teams to visualize content and receive notifications for important updates to your editorial or content calendar. For example, you can help your marketing team quickly visualize the tasks that need to be completed on your content calendar by integrating it with your calendar and creating a custom Slackbot that automates notifications for calendar updates.

Sales

Achieving customer success means everyone on the team needs to be up-to-date on each step of the customer’s journey. With Slack, you can achieve customer success by automating your sales workflow process. One of the key issues with ensuring that prospects transform into paying customers is the follow-up. Follow-up requires nurturing your potential customers. However, your marketing and sales teams aren’t robots (yet). They can’t be available at any given moment every time.

But with the help of Slack, automating this part of the sales process is possible. For example, marketers can have custom solutions made, such as chatbots, that integrate with Slack, to communicate with customers in real-time. These chatbots can automate the sales process by automatically filling out information in the sales database on behalf of the customer. These dynamic software applications can also set up reminders automatically to follow up by specific dates so that marketing and sales team members know when to reach out to the lead without overwhelming her. Also, these team members can easily pick up where another team member left off by accessing notes the chatbot may have automatically generated based on its conversation with the prospect.

Slack’s deep integration with Salesforce also makes it possible to nurture prospects and access information quickly. For instance, you can use the Salesforce integration to link your Salesforce records to Slack channels. This makes it easy to communicate with team members about updates to a lead’s contact information or opportunities to further nurture a lead.

Final Thoughts

When you want to take your marketing to the next level, it’s important to integrate solutions that facilitate automation. Slack helps you to streamline your workflows with automation so your marketing teams can be more effective and productive. It starts with a problem, followed by a solution, and culminating on a beautifully crafted tech integration. Go forth and integrate, your team will thank you for it.